As the costs of computer systems have continued to decrease, while the capabilities of computer systems have increased at remarkable rates, personal computers and work stations have become ubiquitous in office, manufacturing, education, and home environments. As the number of personal computers and workstations used in these environments has increased, monitoring and management tasks associated with the personal computers and work stations have correspondingly increased in volume and complexity, and have become a costly and complex burden for many organizations and individuals. As a result, significant research and development efforts have been directed to automating, as much as possible, monitoring and managing tasks, including data backup, security monitoring, software-update management, configuration management, and other such tasks. Effective automated, remote monitoring and management of computers and work stations depends on monitoring and management software running on remove server computers as well as on robust and reliable communications systems that interconnect these remote server computers with the personal computers and work stations, referred to collectively, in the following discussion, as client computers. Manufacturers and developers of monitoring and management software, monitoring-and-management-service providers, and the many different types of organizations and individuals have all recognized the need for increasingly robust and reliable client/server control protocols for interconnecting client computers to remote monitoring-and-management server computers.